BOCCACCIO ANDTHE FOSSIL 'GIANT'

Giovanni BoccaccioGenealogia deorum gentilium 4.681360-1374 CE

trans. Jason Colavito2012

NOTE

One of my areas of interest is the way artifacts, ruins, and fossils are re-interpreted and reused to create and support myths and legends. One of the most frequently referenced occurrences of a fossil being taken for a mythic figure is the discovery in 1342 of the skeleton of a "giant" at Drepana, modern Tripani, in Sicily. (The date is given by Thomas Fazellus in his 1558 History of Sicily.)The locals turned to Greco-Roman myth to explain the find, which Georges Cuvier and Othenio Abel both concluded must have been the bones of an extinct species of elephant.

Our surviving account of find comes form GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO, the Italian humanist author, in his monumental handbook of mythology, Genealogia deorum gentilium (The Genealogy of the Gods of the Gentiles), composed a few decades later, at which time the discovery had already been encrusted in exaggeration and legend. (Alternately, we might say that Cuvier and Abel were selectively omitting details that do not support their views, such as the lead staff and gigantic chair.) I pick up the translation in chapter 68 of Book IV, just after Boccaccio has described Greco-Roman myths of the Giants.

On the Giants who Came from the Blood of the Titans

... Many things must be said if we wish to solve the riddle of
these fictions, but before anything, we must say that it is not entirely a
fiction that there existed Giants, that is, creatures with the form of men but
exceeding them greatly in stature. And indeed, it appears this was the truth,
and in these days a fortuitous event in the town of Drepana (Tripani) in Sicily
clearly shows this:For, in the foothills of the mountain that rises above Drepana, not far
from the town, a few peasants digging the foundation for the construction of a rural
house came upon the entrance to a certain cavern. When the diggers, with lit
torches, entered in eagerness to see what lay within, they found a grotto of
the greatest height and breadth. Continuing into the grotto, they saw opposite
the entrance a seated man of immense magnitude, of whom they were much
frightened. They quickly took flight and left the cave; nor did they cease
their running until they reached the town, announcing to those they met what
they had seen.
But the citizens were in wonder, and they wished to see what
this evil was, so after lighting torches and gathering arms, they left the city
together as if against an enemy; and more than three hundred entered into the
grotto, and no less dumbstruck, they saw what the workers had reported. At
last, they came closer, after they determined that the man was not alive, and
they saw him sitting on a seat, resting with his left hand on a staff of such
height and thickness that it exceeded the mast of a great ship. So, too, was he
a man of a size unseen and unheard of, and neither were any of his parts gnawed
at or mutilated. And when one of them stretched out his hand and touched the
upright staff, the staff immediately collapsed into ashes, but there remained,
as if stripped of its clothing, another staff of lead rising toward the hand of
him holding it. Examining the staff to their satisfaction, they determined the
lead had been poured into the staff in order to increase its weight, with
respect to which, after they had weighed it, those who saw it said it weighed
fifteen of Drepana’s hundredweights, of which one of these weights is equal to
a hundred common pounds. The body of the man also fell apart upon being
touched, and it turned almost completely to dust. When this dust was handled
with some of their hands, three teeth of monstrous size were discovered still
intact, with a weight of three rotuli,
that is one hundred common ounces.
To preserve evidence of the giant they had found and to create
an everlasting memory for future generations, the Drepanites bound up the remains
in an iron net and hung them in a church within the city dedicated to the
Annunciation of the Virgin and known by that name.
And moreover, a part of the front of the skull was found
still solid and capable of holding several bushels of corn. So, too, was found one
of the leg bones, of which the fullness of age had caused to reach a state of
absolute rottenness; however, those who can determine the total height of a man
from the size of even the smallest of his bones calculated from this remnant
that his size was two hundred cubits or more.
It was suspected by some of the most prudent that this was
Eryx, an extremely powerful king from the area, the son of Butes and Venus, who
was killed by Hercules and afterward hidden in this mountain. But he was
thought by some to be Entellus, who in the funeral games given by Aeneas long
ago for his father Anchises had killed a bull with his fist. Still others
thought him one of the Cyclopes, and quite possibly Polyphemus, of whom Homer
says much. Vergil wrote of him thus: Scarcely had he spoken when we saw on the mountaintop Polyphemus himself moving with his enormous bulk amidst the
cattle And reaching for the well-known shore-- A huge, dread monster whose eye had been put out, And a pine cut down by his own hand guides and steadies his
footsteps.
And a little bit
later he continues: Gnashing his teeth with a groan, he steps through the sea, Now at full height, while the towering waves failed to wet
his tall sides.

And he says many other things that go to show the magnitude
of the Cyclopes, suggesting they belong more toward the truth rather than the hyperbole
which many decide to use in this matter.